The Practices of Humility

Probably the reason why the fourteen practices of humility attributed to Teresa of Calcutta aren't discussed in Richard Foster's Learning Humility is because they're familiar to Christians. Since not all readers of this web site are Christians, perhaps the list is worth reposting here:

1. Speak as little as possible of yourself.

2. Mind your own business.

3. Avoid curiosity.

4. Do not want to manage other people's affairs.

5. Accept contradiction and correction.

6. Pass over the mistakes of others.

7. Accept blame when innocent.

8. Yield to the will of others.

9. Accept insults and injuries.

10. Accept being slighted, forgotten, and disliked.

11. Be kind and gentle, even under provocation.

12. Do not seek to be specially loved and admired.

13. Never stand on your dignity.

14. Choose always the hardest. 

A personal blog, by definition, is always speaking of somebody's self. I do try to focus on things I do, think, recommend to others, rather than just me-me-me, but then again this web site does take the place of letters to some people whose questions might be more about "me" than about the books and butterflies. Beyond that, some people's questions about this web site may be answered by studying the list. Some of these practices I believe are valuable, and try to copy, even on the Internet. 

Some others I believe can easily become harmful. They have their times and places. "Pass over the mistakes of others" is certainly a good rule for editors reading the Internet! Things that I spot and pounce on when I see them printed on paper, I try to avoid letting myself see when people are typing directly onto a computer screen. I try to minimize the amount of time I spend looking at screens, to scan things quickly and print them off it they seem worth reading. Typing on a keyboard built for bigger hands than I happen to have, I feel my fingers hitting letters in the correct order, but then when I print out the blog I see all the times when I hit the letters at an angle and the computer didn't display them, or I hit the letters but the keys were jammed...These things happen when people are typing on computers, and in the interest of reducing damage to everyone's eyes we need to pass over them. When we're being paid to get text printed in a Real Book, that's a different matter. The less one passes over, the more valuable one's editing skills are.

"Accept blame when innocent"? Sometimes I think this may be a good thing. Sometimes questions of ethics and how "innocent" one really is come into play. Suppose I go back to college (again) and work on a project with a lot of seventeen-year-olds. I don't proofread the parts of the paper we agree that they should write, say. I think they're old enough to take responsibility for their own spelling. The prof doesn't liiiike me, maybe he disapproves of people his parents' age taking undergraduate courses, and in discussing why he gave our group the lowest grade he emphasizes that "Even with a professional editor on their team this group managed to submit a paper containing 19 misspelled words, including three instances of 'writting.'" Maybe I should have proofread the paper. Maybe I should not have expected that seventeen-year-olds would at least have corrected "writting." 

And then again, sometimes I think it's a positive sin to enable some people to maintain a pernicious habit of projecting blame onto others when they know very well what they did wrong. Men need to know that any attempt to blame or find fault with a woman is heard as meaning that all the blame belongs entirely to the man. If the man suggests that the woman is to be blamed for anything resembling incompetence, that needs to be recognized as a part of a pattern of hatespeech--women can say "idiot girl," as Black people can use the N word, but men should have to say "I fail to understand." I don't think it's good for anyone that any woman put up with that. kind of hatespews.

"Blame America first" is another pattern that I don't see accomplishing any good. "The price of America's freedom is whatever people in some other country are griping about today" is a meme that needs killing. If people in that other country are poor because they experimented with a socialist or otherwise totalitarian government, admitting that needs to be a requirement for any financial aid. In fact, if we could just face up to the harm socialist programs have done even here, it'd be a good thing to make all foreign aid conditional on poor countries' progress beyond socialism. We deserve some blame for having adopted unsustainable socialist programs under conditions that created the misbelief that any of them could work, but when countries have adopted socialist policies they need to face and learn from that mistake.

Then there's the all-purpose "blame racism" that some people want to use as the get-out-of-jail card in games that don't even have a "jail" square. on the board. Racism is blameworthy because it is a bad thing. Racism is not the only reason why you can't always get what you want. Before starting to blame racism, find proof that racism is operating. Sometimes the person who voted against admitting the Black guy to the club is Black, too. The willingness of non-Black Americans to endure blame for racism, when they don't practice it, should probably always have been even lower than it was. That it is getting lower, now, outside of a small but vocal political minority group, is probably a good thing.

There are also individuals whose habits of self-justification are...the sort of thing this web site does not discuss, at least not in any detail, anyway. One relative, long dead, long ago drove me to a personal policy of "If X says I or anyone else was to blame, assume that all blame belongs to X until X has admitted where X went wrong." I don't think X ever actually did ram a parked car and immediately start scolding the nearest child for distracting X with that tired, sleepy look, but if I'd been told that X had done that I would have believed the story. 

And what about "Yield to the will of others"? Wasn't that where Adam went wrong, in the Garden of Eden? Yes. Wasn't not doing that what Noah did right? How many Bible stories are about the value of ignoring the mistaken advice of other humans and obeying the guidance of God? (Most of them.) 

When a question has no moral implications whatsoever, when it's just about whether the person who wants an extra stop can wait another fifteen miles or the typefont should be Georgia or Garamond, I'm all in favor of yielding to the will of others. I am usually the sort of person you have to needle an opinion out of. Do I want to watch the "Family Feud" rerun or the "Gilligan's Island" rerun? Left to myself I'd watch neither; since I've chosen to be with you I'm more interested in what you want to watch, and why, and how you react to it, than I am in any TV program. If you have a little family drama going on where Tracy allllways teases you to switch from one show to the other and you're counting on me to be the guest who wants to watch your show, you really need to explain that to me ahead of time, because as a guest I don't feel entitled to tell you what to do with your TV set. Neutrality on that sort of thing is part of my personal practice of humility. 

And then again there are times--quite a lot of times--when the issue is moral, and in that case my personal practice of humility requires me to be willing to "Dare to be like Daniel! Dare to stand alone!"

Everyone wants to "Be kind and gentle" but this pleasant thought becomes horrible when we think about  the range of meanings it can have. Some people find it cruel and harsh that we don't support, or even join them in, behavior that may be very harmful. Christian-phobics claim to feel terribly abused and oppressed, even if we don't say a word to them, by the thought that we probably disapprove of some of their personal habits. Toxic friends might want you to come in later, make more mistakes, gain more weight, or otherwise do worse at something than they do, so that at least their record's not the worst. I like to be kind and gentle but I've learned that that can't be priority number one.

And, as for "Choose always the hardest"? Some people have a brainquirk known as masochism. It can take stranger forms, but the classical example of masochism is following a religious tradition that keeps you constantly berating and punishing yourself for your shortcomings. Do a fast! Did you cheat and eat something? No? Did you think about food? Scourge yourself for being a sinner! Freud, who was not a Christian and didn't know Christians nearly as well as he thought he did, thought all Christian teaching and practice was all about masochism. He was wrong, right? About Christians and about so many other things and people Freud was just wrong. Jesus did warn us that sometimes the best thing to do may be the hardest but He never said anything like "choose always the hardest." 

In fact, Christianity often guides us to choose the easiest course of action. If you are not already an addict, which is easier: save money and stay sober so that eventually you go into old age as a sober healthy person, or scrape up the money to buy drugs, sneak around trying not to let people notice that you're taking drugs, get busted and spend time in some sort of "negative place" (as in the opposite of any place you ever intended to be), go through the misery of withdrawal, go through the horrors of bad trips and side-effect reactions, and eventually face old age as a drunkard or druggie? Getting sober may not be easy, but staying sober from the beginning is by far the easier way. 

Practicing Christian discipline is not the same thing as being happy, but it can be hard to tell the two apart. A good Christian obeys the law and thus stays out of trouble with the police, courts, and prison system. A good Christian makes healthy choices and thus avoids a lot of the health problems other people have. A good Christian pays up front and thus avoids having to worry about debt. A good Christian is kind and fair with other people and thus has few enemies. A good Christian does good, mindful work and thus is likely to earn promotions when employed in other people's business, or dominate the market while in business for perself. The Christian life is not primarily about the pursuit of health, wealth, a happy family life, a brilliant career, and after age 30 always looking ten or twenty years younger than other people your age, but in the absence of other factors living a Christian life is likely to lead to all of those things. Whereas drinking and gambling, cheating and stealing, treating people badly, and generally "living like the devil," can reasonably be described as "choosing the hardest" kind of life.